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AAEN meets every Tuesday during the "school year" at Roswell
Area Park. We meet in the large picnic pavilion, right next to the playground
area. Families usually start arriving by 2:30PM, and stay until it is too cold or
getting dark. Many families bring a picnic and snacks and plan to make a day of it.
The park has very nice bathrooms, but bring your own drinks since the water fountain is unreliable.
If you want to start earlier, that would be GREAT! Post a note on the yahoo group
and see if you can get other people interested in joining you.
Roswell Area Park is located at:
10495 Woodstock Rd, Roswell, GA
30075
Here are directions to the park.
In Praise of Parkday
We've started the new year for AAEN and homeschooling our kids, and the
possibilities stretch before us.
AAEN classes are a wonderful addition to the homeschooling experience.
I'm jealous! I would have loved to have had classes such as these as an
option for my 2 now 20-something daughters. But though we didn't have
many classes, we did have something that was of paramount importance to
all the families involved then: we had community. AAEN then was more
far-flung than AAEN today. My now 27 year old's teen group had members
in Eatonton, Dallas, Sharpsburg, and points in between. AAEN had
members from as far away as Augusta.
In those early days, there were 2 main things that created the glue for
that community: the newsletter and playday.
We have no need for the newsletter any more. The Yahoo groups take care
of that function, and greatly reduce the workload and costs of keeping
the group informed and connected.
The weekly playday was viewed by our members as extremely important for
homeschoolers at a time when most people had no clue what homeschooling
was. It was a way for our children to have a social network of their
own, friends that they would grow up with, and unstructured
opportunities to learn how to be a social being in a multi-age group
context, all critical components to learning how to be a functional
member of a community. For the parents, it was an oasis in the week of
simply sitting and visiting with those who would become lifelong
friends, or at the least, lifelong contacts. It was a time when parents
and kids could just relax for a few hours and play. From my perspective
of being on the other side of homeschooling, I miss those wonderful
playdays - and I still count many of those members as close friends.
We seem to have forgotten the absolute importance of play in our
culture. In schools, recess has given way to P.E.. After school play
times can rarely be scheduled because of all the enrichment classes kids
are in. Even for infants and preschoolers, the structured educational
process is strongly encouraged. Parents feel almost delinquent if they
don't do all they can to provide, in every minute, as much of an
educational experience as possible for each child. The homeschool
community is feeling and responding to that pressure too.
That big question, "What about socialization?," that all homeschoolers
are asked at some time or another, implies that classroom time is where
socialization happens. In terms of the school experience, my answer was
I didn't want my kids socialized that way. And in a larger context, the
type of socialization that happens in a classroom, regardless of how
wonderful the class is, gives a very narrow part of what a person needs
to have to be a functioning, sharing, kind, happy, polite, and active
participant in the community at large. The larger lessons come from
real life in real time with real people, especially people with whom
there are long term contacts, such as family and long term friends.
We've been fooled into thinking that if we do 'quality' time with our
kids, that that makes up for lack of quantity time, those large spans of
time where behavior can be corrected as it's happening, lessons of the
specific event occuring can be learned, and the beauty of the moment
attended.
Unstructured play provides necessary educational experiences that cannot
be created in a class, especially in terms of interpersonal
relationships, conflict resolution, creative use of time. Boredom, a
greatly underrated condition, is a springboard to creativity (when my
girls would come to me and say they were bored, I'd hand them a list of
chores they could do. "Uh, no, thanks, Mom, uh, we're not really
bored," they'd say, as they'd disappear into their bedrooms, where they
taught themselves guitar and wrote music). Yet we rarely allow our
children the time and space to be bored.
At the very first AAEN meeting in July 1991, we asked the first AAEN
kids what they wanted out of this group. The answer was unanimous -
they wanted playday. I suspect if parents asked today's AAEN kids the
same question, they would get a similar answer.
As wonderful as having
the classes is, they do not provide the same social experience for the
kids that playday does, nor do they educate the kids in the same way.
There is not the same social time for the parents either. Yet it seems for some AAEN kids, that's what has become the substitute for playday.
I would hope that today's AAEN members would take this opportunity to
celebrate playday, to give themselves one afternoon a week where parents
and kids can forge bonds of friendship, and slow the pace of their lives
for those few hours.
It can be such a golden time - and tomorrow your kids will be grown and that opportunity to have one full Playday a week will be gone.
Carpe Diem!
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